Charlotte Preston

12/11/2025

Good afternoon 🧡

11/11/2025

Have you ever noticed how your ability to handle life's hard things varies from day to day? This fluctuation is normal. But we also have a baseline nervous system capacity.

Think of it like a container that has both a foundation size (your baseline capacity) and daily flexibility. While your capacity naturally ebbs and flows with life's circumstances, rest, and stress levels, you also have a baseline capacity that can be gradually expanded over time.

Being overwhelmed has less to do with the intensity of our feelings and more to do with both our current and baseline capacity to hold them. Just like a cup can only hold so much water, our nervous system has its foundation size—but we can build a larger, more resilient container. Nervous system-centred therapy like Somatic Experiencing can help us with this. 

Through somatic therapy, we can work on expanding this baseline capacity while also learning to navigate daily fluctuations. It's not about reducing our feelings or learning to "control" them—it's about creating a more spacious foundation that can flex and adapt with life's rhythms.

Some signs you might be reaching your current capacity:

Feeling easily startled

Difficulty concentrating

Physical tension

Emotional reactivity

Sleep disruption

Sensory sensitivity

Building capacity is a gradual process. While your day-to-day capacity might fluctuate, building an awareness and relationship with your nervous system can create lasting expansion of your baseline ability to hold life's experiences.

Are you curious about working with your nervous system capacity? Let me know in the comments below 💚 or any questions? 

                 

11/11/2025

Have you ever noticed how your ability to handle life's hard things varies from day to day? This fluctuation is normal. But we also have a baseline nervous system capacity.

Think of it like a container that has both a foundation size (your baseline capacity) and daily flexibility. While your capacity naturally ebbs and flows with life's circumstances, rest, and stress levels, you also have a baseline capacity that can be gradually expanded over time.

Being overwhelmed has less to do with the intensity of our feelings and more to do with both our current and baseline capacity to hold them. Just like a cup can only hold so much water, our nervous system has its foundation size—but we can build a larger, more resilient container. Nervous system-centred therapy like Somatic Experiencing can help us with this. 

Through somatic therapy, we can work on expanding this baseline capacity while also learning to navigate daily fluctuations. It's not about reducing our feelings or learning to "control" them—it's about creating a more spacious foundation that can flex and adapt with life's rhythms.

Some signs you might be reaching your current capacity:

Feeling easily startled

Difficulty concentrating

Physical tension

Emotional reactivity

Sleep disruption

Sensory sensitivity

Building capacity is a gradual process. While your day-to-day capacity might fluctuate, building an awareness and relationship with your nervous system can create lasting expansion of your baseline ability to hold life's experiences.

Are you curious about working with your nervous system capacity? Let me know in the comments below 💚 or any questions? 

                    

09/11/2025

Trauma can shape the brain and nervous system in profound ways.

It changes how your body processes stress, how you perceive safety, and how you adapt to survive what once felt too much.

These responses aren’t signs of brokenness : they’re signs of how your system adapted in an attempt to protect you.

When we understand this, we stop pathologising and understand the intelligence of these protective responses.
Healing often begins by recognising that your responses make sense.

Thank you to for this powerful video.

follow for more on recovery from trauma and complex trauma
see link at the top of my page for ways we can work together

🧠🌿

07/11/2025

06/11/2025

So many people live in a constant battle with their body - trying to change, control, or perfect it.
But often, those struggles didn’t begin in front of a mirror.

They began in moments when it wasn’t safe to be in your body. When love or belonging felt conditional. When your nervous system learned that control might equal safety.

Exploring the link between body image and trauma allows us to see that these patterns aren’t vanity : they’re protection.

Somatic therapy helps us meet those protective parts with compassion, reconnect with the living body, and rebuild a sense of safety from the inside out.

This distinction was personally helpful to me, which I discovered through somatics :
Our objectified body is the version of our body that's judged, praised, or criticised from the outside. Like many others, or most others, this became the lens through which I viewed and criticised myself from a young age.
But somatic work helped me to discover something else... My living body. The one I could feel and experience from the inside-out. Through somatics I learned that I could connect with my body not only as an image, but also as a living experience, and also connect with and feel safer accessing the emotions and experiences beneath the surface.

Healing body image isn’t about fixing how we look - it’s about remembering we were never broken.

04/11/2025

So many of us live with jaw tension, teeth grinding, or pain in the face and neck. 

If massaging it away hasn't worked for you, it could be helpful to explore from a wider perspective : considering stress and your relationship to stress. also, your impulses, emotions and the way your body wanted to express in the past, but couldn't.
It’s where unspoken words, suppressed emotions, and held-back impulses live.

Every time we bit our tongue instead of speaking up,
swallowed tears,
or tried to stay calm when our body wanted to shout,
that energy didn’t disappear.
It got stored in our tissues - especially around the jaw, throat and mouth.

In Somatic Experiencing, we gently help the body complete what it couldn’t before.

As this happens, and we build more awareness of our body and the ways in which we hold tension, people often report that tension reduces, sleep improves,
and expression starts to feel more natural again.

–––

 If this resonates, follow for more on recovery from trauma and complex trauma -  including how holding patterns like tension show up in the body.

See the link at the top of my page for more on specialist somatic sessions in trauma and complex trauma recovery.

02/11/2025

When the body has lived in survival for too long, it forgets what ease feels like.

Stress hormones stay high. Inflammation lingers. The whole system learns to stay on guard, even when there’s no real threat.

Over time, that vigilance often shows up as exhaustion, anxiety, chronic pain, or autoimmune flare-ups.

But none of this means your body is broken. It’s showing you how hard it’s worked to protect you.

Healing begins when your body starts to feel safe again - not just in theory, but in real time.
Safety and connection give your biology permission to soften, repair, and rest.

What if your symptoms are your body’s way of asking to be listened to, not fixed? 🌿

Original video credit

02/11/2025

This reflection is from Emma, 42 (name changed for confidentiality), who is on a path of recovery from childhood trauma. Her words speak to what’s possible when safety, attunement, and curiosity begin to replace self-blame and fear.

The people who really know the most about trauma recovery are the people who are living it. It takes tremendous perseverance and courage to keep going - especially when you’re healing the parts of you that learned to survive what was once unbearable.

It’s an honour to walk beside people for part of their journey. 🧡

30/10/2025

I know how frustrating it can feel to live with tension or symptoms that don’t seem to shift - even after trying so many approaches. I work with many people in this situation.

This is a story (shared with anonymity + permission) from a Somatic Experiencing client session, to give a glimpse into how this work can bring new understanding, relief, and the possibility of using our body sensations as guides to what we need more or less of in our life - in this case, personal space.

🌿 My client had explored many routes: GP visits, nutritional therapy, regular exercise, and years of talk therapy : she’s a psychotherapist herself. Yet the tightness in her lower belly remained, like a constant background hum.

Through our somatic work together, she began to sense what the tension was protecting. She realised that it carried the feeling of “someone too close” - a familiar state her body had learned early on, when her personal space was never respected.

That image and realisation changed everything. She said that, for the first time, she could feel what personal space actually was. And she began gently experimenting with this in her daily life - noticing when her body started to brace, and giving herself more room.

As we worked with the feeling of anger that lived underneath the tension, and helped her body learn that it was safe to feel it, the bracing began to soften. It now shows up far less often, and when it does, she recognises it as a boundary signal - not just “tension to get rid of.”

🪞 Somatic work can help us listen to the language of the body : where tension, tightness, or symptoms can hold stories that words alone can’t reach. When we learn to listen, we can begin to release the old patterns of protection that are no longer needed.

🧠 The mind–body connection is real and powerful. Feeling our emotions through the body isn’t just healing - research shows it supports our wellbeing on every level.

Imagine if we tried to “get rid of” the tension, without ever asking what it needed.

See the link at the top of my page for specialised sessions in trauma and complex trauma recovery.

Follow for more on recovery from trauma & CPTSD.

29/10/2025

If you've ever thought 'why is this taking so long?! Or 'why can't I just get over it already?! You're not alone. And it's completely understandable that you'd want to get over feeling the really tough and overwhelming stuff asap. Almost everyone feels this way on the healing path.

But real nervous system work is by nature slow, because it's working at a very deep level. It needs time, just like learning a new language : we couldn't do it in a month. We could create some really great foundations in a month, but much more time is needed. This is because it's working at the level of your physiology : the internal processes of your body, deeper than your behaviour and your thoughts.

It isn't slow because you're doing it wrong. It just needs that time to land properly and integrate. It's because your nervous system is actually doing it right.

It tends to be the case that when we stop forcing it, trying to fix it, hack it, make it perfect. That's when it starts to land better and real change starts to happen.

Healing happens naturally when we create the conditions, without excess force. So, slower is often faster.

Follow for more on recovery from trauma and complex trauma.

See the link at the top of my page to read about my one to one specialist sessions in Somatic experiencing trauma and complex trauma recovery.

💙

28/10/2025

In Somatic Experiencing therapy, we approach this gradually.
We call it titration - working with just the right dosage of sensation or emotion, so your nervous system never feels overwhelmed.

What’s been buried was likely buried for good reason - it wasn’t safe to express before. Now, in the space of recovery, it can be met slowly, safely, and at your pace. Over time, your system learns that it no longer needs to suppress, but can *express* - and in doing so, recover more vitality, aliveness, and more of you.

We might express though words, movement, sound, impulses, reflexes through the body. All help energy that was held in through suppression of what we wanted to say or couldn't feel, to be expressed, move through and complete.

Along the way in this process, there is often the discovery that all along...
you weren’t bad.
That what you felt wasn’t wrong.

You’re not too much. And you don’t need to censor yourself here.

Sometimes, in trying to “be calm,” we skip over the anger that still needs to be felt and expressed. But when we gently begin to acknowledge and express what was once squashed down, something in us can finally settle.

For me, learning to let anger back in was life-changing. Beneath the shame of feeling “too much” was the truth that I was never bad : just a kid whose body needed to fight back.

And when I let that be true - I found calm.
Real, grounded calm. And realised that calm all the time isn't the goal, it's meant to exist alongside all of these other energies, including anger. Anger, just like a cat would swipe their claws when another invades their space is simple : simple and serves a purpose.

One of the interesting things about anger is that the more we can feel it and express it, the less explosive it tends to be. Sometimes, it just comes out as a clear, grounded 'no'.

All of you is welcome here .